{"id":12641,"date":"2011-03-14T11:23:26","date_gmt":"2011-03-14T15:23:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=12641"},"modified":"2011-03-14T12:31:14","modified_gmt":"2011-03-14T16:31:14","slug":"brian-christian-on-the-most-human-human","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/03\/14\/brian-christian-on-the-most-human-human\/","title":{"rendered":"Brian Christian on ‘The Most Human Human’"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Photograph by Michael Langan.<\/p><\/div>\n

Brian Christian, who studied computer science, philosophy, and poetry, has just published his first book,<\/em> The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive<\/a>. Recently, he answered my questions about the Turing test, online romance, and conversation fillers.<\/em><\/p>\n

Your new book has an odd but intriguing title: The Most Human Human<\/em>. Can you explain what it means?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Most Human Human is an award given out each year at the Loebner Prize, the artificial intelligence (AI) community\u2019s most controversial and anticipated annual competition. The event is what\u2019s called a Turing test<\/a>, in which a panel of judges conducts a series of five-minute-long chat conversations over a computer with a series of real people and with a series of computer programs pretending<\/em> to be people by mimicking human responses.\u00a0The catch, of course, is that the judges don\u2019t know at the start who\u2019s who, and it\u2019s their job in five minutes of conversation to try to find out.<\/p>\n

Each year, the program that does the best job of persuading the judges that it\u2019s human wins the Most Human Computer award and a small research grant for its programmers. But there\u2019s also an award, strangely enough, for the human<\/em> who does the best job of swaying the judges: the Most Human Human award.<\/p>\n

British mathematician Alan Turing famously predicted in 1950 that computers would be passing the Turing test\u2014that is, consistently fooling judges at least 30 percent of the time and as a result, generally considered to be intelligent in the human sense\u2014by the year 2000.\u00a0This prediction didn\u2019t come to pass, but I was riveted to read that, in 2008, the computers came up shy of that mark by just a single vote. I decided to call up the test\u2019s organizers and get involved in the 2009 contest as one of the human \u201cconfederates\u201d\u2014which meant I was both a part of the human \u201cdefense,\u201d trying to prevent the machines from passing the test, and also vying with my fellow confederates for that intriguing Most Human Human award.\u00a0The book tells the story of my attempt to prepare, as well as I could, for that role:\u00a0What exactly does it mean to \u201cact as human as possible\u201d in a Turing test?\u00a0And what does it mean in life?<\/p>\n

The organizers of the Turing test competition gave you the following advice as you set out to win the Most Human Human prize: just be yourself; you are, after all, human. Why wasn\u2019t just being human good enough to win? How can you be more human than other humans?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Oxford philosopher John Lucas says that if the Turing test is passed, it will not be \u201cbecause machines are so intelligent, but because humans, many of them at least, are so wooden.\u201d\u00a0That is part of what\u2019s so fascinating about the Turing test:\u00a0 fundamentally it\u2019s a test of communication<\/em>, and there\u2019s a sense in which this contest, which we invented as a means for measuring the machines, actually turns out to be a means of measuring ourselves.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, the ability to fluently use natural language is an incredible challenge for computer scientists, whereas it comes naturally to us, even as children. But on the other hand, we know from experience that conversations aren\u2019t uniformly successful, and there\u2019s a huge demand in our culture for public-speaking coaches, communication coaches, dating advice. The intriguing paradox for me is that communication is perhaps our greatest cognitive achievement and<\/em> the place with the greatest room for improvement.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>As you point out in the book, Daniel Gilbert, the author of Stumbling on Happiness<\/em>, has said that every psychologist must at some point fill in the following sentence: \u201cThe human being is the only animal that _____.\u201d\u00a0In preparing for the Turing test, did you come up with your own formulation?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s intriguing that Gilbert says the \u201conly animal<\/em>,\u201d because I think that has actually been the biggest shift in the past fifty years. This question of what makes humans special and different and unique goes back all the way at least to Aristotle and Plato, and traditionally we\u2019ve compared ourselves against animals as a means of answering it.\u00a0Now, in the twenty-first century, we much more commonly compare ourselves against machines.\u00a0I think one of the fascinating things about living at this particular moment in history is that the computer represents perhaps the greatest difference between our world and Aristotle\u2019s. So computers are not only shedding light on that answer but are also forcing us to revise <\/em>that answer at the same time.<\/p>\n

As for my own sentence, I don\u2019t necessarily know\u2014and I\u2019ll be interested to see how others revise their sentences in the years to come\u2014but there\u2019s something to be said for the fact that humans are rather uniquely poised in a place where they have access to both deliberate, logical thinking and<\/em> instinctive, intuitive thinking. And of course, one can always turn the sentence on itself: humans appear to be the only things anxious about what makes them unique.<\/p>\n

You point out that AI programs generally produce so-called stateless conversations, in which the chatbot is responding only to the previous question, showing no awareness of the larger context or form of the dialogue. What does this reveal about how computers think? And what insight did this give you into human conversation?<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you look, for instance, at Jeopardy! <\/em>transcripts, you realize that you can scramble the order of the questions without affecting the answers.\u00a0But if you scramble the order of a human dialogue, you likely destroy it. A conversation is more than the sum of its parts.\u00a0It has an arc; it generates its own context.<\/p>\n

One of the most telling things about human conversation is how context sensitive it is. I love walking down the street and trying to pick out snippets of conversation. They\u2019re frequently completely unintelligible: \u201cYeah, and so that\u2019s what she told <\/em>him, but he thought that they\u2019d never even been<\/em> there, right?\u201d\u00a0\u201cRight, no, yeah, no, I know!\u201d\u00a0Probably if we\u2019d been listening in for several minutes, that would make sense. Or perhaps not. I imagine someone sitting down to lunch with a close friend, and the first question is \u201cSo have you finally told her how you feel yet?\u201d Sometimes a pronoun can be locked into place for years.\u00a0This type of compressed, contextual richness is part of what we value about longstanding relationships.<\/p>\n

In one of the most remarkable anecdotes in the book, you describe how one of the founders of the Turing test competition fell in love with a Russian woman on an online dating service\u2014only to discover that he had been exchanging lengthy love letters for more than four months with a computer program! What does this say about the nature of love? Are falling in love online and offline different?<\/strong><\/p>\n

To convey our identity online we use content, information, your PIN, SSN, password, code.\u00a0In real life we use not content but form<\/em>: I recognize you by the shape of your face, the timbre of your voice, your handwriting or signature. Less by what<\/em> you say or write than how<\/em>.<\/p>\n

To take just one recent example of how online and offline intimacy diverge: I was saddened when Facebook changed its Activities and Interests sections from write-in boxes to essentially drop-down menus.\u00a0Their goal was to get the people who like \u201cbasketball\u201d and the people who like \u201cbball\u201d to be linked to the same page\u2014innocuous enough at first blush. But in doing so, the space goes from being a place to define ourselves with how<\/em> we express our interests to simply what<\/em> those interests are. What\u2019s lost is tremendous.<\/p>\n

I recall hearing the inventor of speed dating, Yaacov Deyo, say that in his first few sessions he had to go so far as to literally ban the questions \u201cSo what do you do?\u201d and \u201cSo where are you from?\u201d\u00a0Their answers, overly informational, weren\u2019t actually very productive. What we love about people isn\u2019t their properties, it\u2019s their manner. With that in mind, there are far better questions to ask, ones that evince not the way someone looks on paper but rather their idiosyncrasies, attitudes, personality, style.<\/p>\n

Everyday conversation is filled with seemingly meaningless fillers such as uh<\/em>\u00a0and um<\/em>.\u00a0These nonwords make most of us sound pretty stupid, but how do they in fact capture what is most deeply human about us?<\/strong><\/p>\n

We often think about conversation as a series of discrete \u201cturns,\u201d but as linguists are discovering, the negotiation and construction of those turns, every bit as much as what\u2019s said during them, is an incredibly complex, subtle, and vital part of communication.\u00a0The turns of a dialogue, unlike an epistolary exchange or a walkie-talkie conversation where each segment is clearly and rigidly delineated, are fluid: speakers chime in, interrupt, finish, or revise each other\u2019s sentences, offer yeah<\/em>s and mm-hmm<\/em>s and really?<\/em>s, yield the floor, hold the floor. There\u2019s as much complexity and art to the form of a conversation as the content.<\/p>\n

Uh<\/em> and um<\/em> (and their foreign-language equivalents) surprisingly turn out to be a big part of this process of negotiating conversational structure.<\/p>\n

Noam Chomsky\u2019s theory of syntax famously excluded \u201csuch grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, [and] shifts of attention and interest,\u201d but in practice, as language is performed \u201cout in the wild,\u201d each of these factors is hugely influential, and each holds its own store of subtlety and nuance. Linguists have established, for instance, that different-length pauses typically follow uh<\/em> than follow um<\/em>, which implies that speakers are making purposeful (if unconscious) decisions between the two.<\/p>\n

The good news is that in the 2009 competition no AI program passed the Turing test, and you won the Most Human Human prize. What clinched the prize for you? <\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to look back now and feel that my choices were right, but of course at the time I had no idea if I was being successful or not. Trying too hard risks its own sense of falseness, of course. (One year a Shakespeare expert famously discovered\u2014after consciously trying to demonstrate as much knowledge as she possibly could\u2014that two judges simply decided, \u201cNo<\/em> one knows that much about Shakespeare\u201d and voted her a computer.)<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know if anything necessarily clinched it, but I tried to be as sensitive as I could to everything I\u2019d learned in my preparation about what makes human conversation so subtle and complex, and conversely what sorts of corners chatbots tend to cut, so that I could emphasize precisely those things. I tried to create more of a linguistic collaboration, rather than a strict taking of turns\u2014not only to answer what was asked of me but to at times finish the judge\u2019s sentence, or respond in advance to what I was anticipating they\u2019d ask next. I also strove to steer the conversation as quickly as possible out of the patterned small talk and etiquette that the programs know by rote, and to give not only appropriate and context-sensitive answers but to generate a larger arc to the conversation and to have the answers present more than the sum of their parts: a coherent and distinct sense of personality from one to the next. If they had asked me what the morning\u2019s weather was, for instance, I\u2019d not only respond with the correct \u201cgray and rainy\u201d but would volunteer something rooting the answer into my life story: \u201cOh, gray and rainy, but I live in Seattle, so that\u2019s pretty much par for the course.\u201d\u00a0Those little touches gave the judge a lot more options for follow-up questions and worked to break the conversation out of either simple pleasantries or a more interrogation-style Q & A and into something much more natural and free flowing.<\/p>\n

Other parts of the strategy were slightly more complicated, but at the end of the day, part of what\u2019s scary about something like the Turing test is that you can never know for certain that you and a judge will be each other\u2019s \u201ckind of people\u201d\u2014whether or not you\u2019ll resonate with each other and hit it off.\u00a0Study only gets you so far.\u00a0At the same time, a look at how these programs attempt to model and mimic conversation, and simultaneously at the linguists and philosophers who study it, provides an incredible window into how to keep conversation firing on all cylinders, and at just how bewilderingly nuanced and complex it is when you do.<\/p>\n

When a program does pass the test\u2014and this will eventually happen\u2014is it nightfall for humanity?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No, I don\u2019t think so.\u00a0There\u2019s a certain mythos to the idea that as soon as the Turing test is passed, it\u2019s passed forever; for instance, once the gold Loebner Prize award is handed out, the Loebner Prize will be discontinued and never held again. In fact, I think that the first time we lose a Turing test will be a fascinating\u2014and redemptive\u2014moment: a slap in the face, but also a bit of a wake-up call, a call to arms.\u00a0Humans are by far the most adaptive species on the planet, and far from spelling our doom, a defeat might be a healthy spur toward raising the level of play, which, in the case of the Turing test, also happens to be the level at which we communicate with one another in our everyday lives.<\/p>\n

As Stephen Baker tells it, the IBM team and the Jeopardy!<\/em> producers clashed when IBM refused to let the show\u2019s writers prepare brand-new questions specially for the match after having seen what their Watson<\/a> machine could do.\u00a0IBM was worried they\u2019d unconsciously devise newer and cleverer types of questions to target the gaps in Watson\u2019s abilities.\u00a0For instance, one of the clues in the Watson contest was \u201cIn 2002 Eminem signed this rapper to a seven-figure deal, obviously worth a lot more than his name implies.\u201d (Answer: 50 Cent.)\u00a0 A Jeopardy!<\/em> writer familiar with how Watson\u2019s AI works couldn\u2019t help but think that removing explicit reference to Eminem<\/em> and 2002<\/em>, leaving only the pun about what the rapper\u2019s name implies, makes it only slightly harder for the human contestants, but totally pulls the rug out from under the machine. In some sense, I think the real essence of the Watson match isn\u2019t the machine versus the contestants but the machine versus the writers<\/em>: an arms race between better answers and better questions.<\/p>\n

This to me suggests precisely the kind of human trait I would be exhilarated to see in the context of the Turing test.\u00a0The increasing ubiquity of e-mail spam is already forcing us to humanize our e-mails, lest they be judged inauthentic. What would a Turing test\u2013passing bot do to our conversations? My experience as a confederate\u2014looking at how they attempt to simplify conversation to make it manageable and doing what I could to avoid and disrupt those simplifications\u2014gave me a window into what that might look like, and it\u2019s something I would be fascinated to see society as a whole grapple with. How do we\u00a0be \u201cmore human\u201d in our interactions with one another? The pressure that the Turing test is beginning to put on us is, I think, an incredibly healthy and productive one.<\/p>\n

What do you think we\u2019ve learned from Watson\u2019s performance<\/a>?<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the riveting things about watching the history of AI unfold is that it\u2019s come back to us with some very startling and counterintuitive verdicts about what\u2019s \u201chard\u201d and what\u2019s \u201ceasy.\u201d\u00a0Who would have imagined we\u2019d have computers landing planes before they could ride bikes, or translating UN documents before they could look at a picture of a horse and say, \u201cThat\u2019s a horse\u201d?\u00a0 Compared to the order in which humans learn these things, and how difficult we believe them to be, these sorts of results are really quite astonishing.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what you see when you look at the IBM contest. What impresses us about Jeopardy!<\/em> champions like Ken Jennings<\/a> and Brad Rutter is how much knowledge they\u2019re able to retain.\u00a0That they know what the questions are asking<\/em> and that they stand at the podium before the round and banter with Trebek isn\u2019t on our radar at all.\u00a0But for the IBM team, encoding virtually all world knowledge wasn\u2019t approached as being particularly challenging\u2014or particularly interesting. The entire weight of the research team was thrown at deciphering the language <\/em>of the clues: their puns, their wordplay, their ambiguity. Google represents a step ahead of, say, database queries, and Watson represents a step ahead of that; we\u2019re posing clues rather than keywords and getting back phrases instead of URLs, but the result is still much closer to a deposition than a conversation.<\/p>\n

I actually think that if you look at it in its broader historical context, you can view the contest as a kind of victory, or at least a validation.\u00a0The challenge wasn\u2019t the things about Rutter and Jennings that make them trivia experts or Jeopardy!<\/em> champions; it was the things that make them people.<\/p>\n

Indeed, some see the history of AI as a dehumanizing narrative; I see it as much the reverse.\u00a0We build these things in our own image, leveraging all the understanding of ourselves we have, and then we get to see where they fall short.\u00a0That gap always has something new to teach us about who we are.<\/p>\n

We conducted this exchange via e-mail. So what do you think: am I machine or human, and how do you know? (Cue ominous music.)<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a great quote from Pablo Picasso: \u201cComputers\u00a0are useless. They can only give you answers.\u201d\u00a0To me there\u2019s something deeply true about that: to ask a good question is at least as complex and subtle as to give a good answer\u2014maybe more so.\u00a0And increasingly I come to think of curiosity as the distinctively human emotion, because it\u2019s a part of our hybrid animal\/rational nature: desire and knowledge bumping up against one another. So you may be relieved to know that as computers edge their way into more and more sectors of the job market, the people with the highest job security will likely be the interviewers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brian Christian, who studied computer science, philosophy, and poetry, has just published his first book, The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive. Recently, he answered my questions about the Turing test, online romance, and conversation fillers. Your new book has an odd but intriguing title: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":131,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[1980,1978,1981,1983,1976,1045,1982,1875,1977,1979],"class_list":["post-12641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-brian-christian","tag-computers","tag-conversation","tag-eric-chinski","tag-google","tag-human","tag-jeopardy","tag-the-most-human-human","tag-turing"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBrian Christian on 'The Most Human Human' by Eric Chinski<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 14, 2011 \u2013 Brian Christian, who studied computer science, philosophy, and poetry, has just published his first book, The Most Human Human: What Talking with\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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